Over the course of 2013 and early 2014, he estimates, Chris Smither spent more time in his hometown of New Orleans than he had in the whole 50 years prior.

The son of a Tulane professor, Smither had grown up musically in bohemian cafes like the Quorum and the Dream Castle in the early 1960s, watching Babe Stovall and Jerry Jeff Walker pick blues guitar and tell stories. At the time, similarly-minded artists like Dave van Ronk and Joan Baez were part of a movement up North to revive those acoustic blues and folk sounds, and feeling the lack of such a scene at home, Smither moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he's been ever since, and has enjoyed a pretty celebrated career: a Smither tribute album featuring Bonnie Raitt, Loudon Wainwright, Josh Ritter and others, in fact, is due out later this year.

At the urging of producer David Goodrich, Smither returned to New Orleans late last year to record "Still On The Levee," a two-disc, 25-song retrospective spanning his full career. The package – along with a separate, book-sized collection of Smither's lyrics – came out in late June. (New Orleanians Allen Toussaint and Jeremy Lyons, as well as Wainwright and Smither's daughter Robin play on it.)

On Saturday, July 26, Smither plays Chickie Wah Wah. In advance of the gig, he called from the road to discuss watching "Treme," the ebb and flow of Americana music's popularity, and what it's like to slip into the mind of a self 50 years younger than you are now and try to sing his songs.

Is New Orleans totally unrecognizable to you now? Or do you still feel at home when you visit?

It changed an awful lot. The whole town feels very familiar, the way people are – it reaches down into something I recognize as being a part of me. I binge-watched that show "Treme," just recently, and one of the things I loved about that show was the fact that they got it across that there's this essential kind of endearing corniness to New Orleans that I love, and that I recognize, and it felt so good. It took me probably a week to start feeling like I lived there again. It takes a long time for that stuff to come back. But by the time I was done, I just felt so comfortable. I thought, "Well, I can move down here again." I don't think I will, though.

But would you think about spending more time here?

Well, that club Chickie Wah Wah that I've been playing, is the only place in all the time that I've been away that's conducive to the kind of music that I play, in the sense that they come in, they pay a cover charge and they sit and listen.

Chris Smither

What: New Orleans-born folk blues guitarist returns to his hometown for a gig promoting “Still on the Levee,” a new two-disc retrospective of his 50-year career. With Peter Mulvey.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, July 26.

Where: Chickie Wah Wah, 2828 Canal St.

Tickets: $10.

New Orleans has a lot more artists playing your kind of music now.

I'm aware of that, it's kind of a shame that it's so late in my career. The fact that I've played there 3 or 4 times in the last couple of years is remarkable, because the only other times I've gotten to come down have been for Jazz Fest. I would do well at Jazz Fest, the tent would be full, but none of those people would be from New Orleans, they would have flown in from all over the country.

There's really a lot more people playing this kind of folk blues and Americana now in general. It's like a folk-revival revival.

I'm glad to hear you mention that, because I was thinking it might be my imagination. These things go in cycles, and it seems hard to believe that I've been alive long enough to see it come around again. But it seems that way to me. I've definitely noticed my audience is getting younger. For years and years, my audience was getting old along with me, and now all of a sudden there's 20- and 30-year-olds coming in to see me, which I hadn't seen for a long time.

Why do you think that style is popular again? I always wonder if it's a backlash against technology – EDM and super-produced pop and R&B, and things like that.

Of course I'm inclined to believe this, so I'm not sure whether it's true or not, because it's something that I want to believe. Technology has its benefits, but it has its detriments too, and one of the detriments is that as the music gets more and more manufactured, it becomes less satisfying. To a degree, people don't really understand why they're not happy with it, but they know there's got to be something else, and they start looking, and they find it. They might not be able to pinpoint or talk coherently about why it is that they like this music better, but basically when music gets too perfect it becomes unsatisfying.

When everything is exactly right, when you don't hear these minor little variations in approaches and time and particularly in rhythm – when rhythm becomes so exact, when there's never even the minutest little variation, and there isn't because it's all done by machines, there's something lacking from it. And most people don't even recognize what it is that they're missing, they just know something is missing. They would be hard pressed themselves to define what it is they're getting from what I think of as real music, as opposed to manufactured music. So that might be part of it. But the same sort of thing happened in the '60s, which was another sort of technological revolution, with recordings becoming more and more manufactured. I think that contributed to the big phenomenon back then.

On "Still On The Levee," you went all the way back to that time, the beginning of your career. What was it like dusting off songs you wrote 50 years ago, to record again?

I was very surprised at how well a lot of them held up. I was a little nervous about going back and trying to play some of the stuff that I'd written in my twenties. I think I thought I would be embarrassed by some of it. But there was very little of that, and when there was, I would just sort of smile and recognize that that was something that a younger man would do, that I wouldn't do now. The first song on the double CD is the very first song I ever wrote. It's called "Devil Got Your Man," and I sit there and listen to it and say, 'What the hell did I know about that kind of misery when I was 19 years old?' I realized that I thought I knew something, and that was enough at the time. I come to it now with a more thorough understanding of what I was talking about than at the time, and with a lot more life experience to sort of fill it out. But the feeling at the time was genuine, even if there was less input. I somehow tapped into something that was a universal feeling, even though I didn't really have the experience to know what I was talking about. And to me that's remarkable.

I don't take any credit for it, I don't think it says anything great about me. It says something about human experience, that's it's very hard to make distinctions between feelings. There's something universal about those feelings that has very little to do with your circumstance. And that just came back to me time and time again with these songs, which were written when, by all rights, I shouldn't have had the remotest idea about what I was talking about.